Restaurant Dans le Noir ? Paris — Restaurant in Paris

Had reserved a table for my wife and I almost a year in advance. Really excited to try this unique experience. Service was good but ultimately the food was terrible. Bland salad starter. A main meal that was something just fatty and greasy and otherwise tasteless. The dessert was the worst: some sort of vodka orange ice cream concoction that just tasted like dish soap. Considering the price and the expectations, very disappointing. The room is too loud for any intimate experience or any close interaction of tasting and experiencing the meal—especially considering how awful it was. It went from being about “an enhanced experience with sight removed as a distraction” to “I want to see this because I’m honestly a little worried it’s not fresh or has something inedible mixed with it.” Can’t recommend for the cost and trouble.

RESPONSE TO BUSINESS: I find your “apology” insulting. To say “you had the option to stop & leave at any time” is dismissive of what we invested just to be there.

We had to reserve seats in advance, fly from the United States. Take a long cab ride to your location to arrive by opening time, put our belongings in one of your basement lockers (because for some reason nobody could get the upstairs ones to lock). Then we had the pre-dinner questionnaire, met our server, get in a single file line to be awkwardly led to a table in absolute pitch black in a soundproof-insulated dining area (the layout of which we couldn’t tell). We sit through the introduction. We spend the better half of the experience adjusting to the novelty of eating in the dark as we wait long periods for each course, having to put our fingers in our water glasses to pour, fumble around for cutlery, politely excuse every time our neighbors grabbed our water or fork.

So with all the enthusiasm, preparation, time and money we already had invested just to get to your establishment & adjust to the experience, on top of the fact that we wanted to be considerate of the great effort your vision-impaired wait staff goes to in a crowded, pitch-black room full of strangers, you want to give the backhanded excuse “You could’ve left at any time”?

Do you think someone on their first trip to Paris, celebrating their 25-year-overdue honeymoon, with an enthusiastic desire to try something they’ve heard so much about at this exclusive, reservation-only restaurant, sitting in the crowded dark felt totally free to say “This is awful” before they’ve even tried the rest of the meal to know that none of it was good?

Do you think my wife or I felt 100% free to complain & ask to leave when both of us wanted the other to at least enjoy the experience, if it was just a case of our individual taste being the problem? We were clearly told IF EATING IN THE DARK BECAME UNCOMFORTABLE we could ask to be led out “at any time.” We didn’t necessarily feel free by the end after trying the whole meal to walk out & say it was some of the worst food we’d ever had.

Neither of us wanted to be “the ugly tourist” our first time in this country; we wanted to try new things & we don’t go around arrogantly assuming anything we personally don’t enjoy is bad. We allow that something new might not be poorly made to begin with. And by the end after we’d given it a full chance & we were just disappointed & wanted to leave to get better food elsewhere (which we did).

Though now reading the many, MANY bad recent reviews echoing EXACTLY our same issue, clearly we were not “ugly tourists” with a jaded palate: this food really was bad by any standard. I wish we had said so at the time, instead of trying to be considerate foreign guests.

Customers already that invested just to get a seat at the table shouldn’t be under pressure to feel they’re being ungrateful or rude, ignorant international patrons saying the meal was outright awful…YOUR BUSINESS should be under pressure to deliver GOOD FOOD from the start. You know what you’re serving is sub-par & you know patrons feel obliged to not say anything given the conditions you...

My pregnant GF got raw meat!

I must say I had one of the worst visits I’ve ever had a mistake that’s should have been taken more seriously then this! For shame cause it’s one of the most rememberable moments of when I came to Paris for the first time 2015.

So to start. The services was fine to begin with, the first waiter forgot to put us in to the line so we had to wait, 6 other people that came after us went in before us. Luckily this nice lady noticed what was going on an took our order again.

When we were all settled in and ready to go we were rushed in, and more then that, last time I came there weren’t that many people but this was bizarre, we were cramped in between others, the place really loud, there was really no time enjoying the darkness, everyone speaking louder in then in the worst bars.

The appetizer was some coriander, bean drink, that had little taste, much like some dipping sauce in an Indian restaurant, and the starter was tasteless, and there was no real smell of it, you would think, at a blind restaurant that they would try to make The food at least smell.

The server we had, was clearly swamped, for she was vibrating stress, and it felt like she was not handling the pressure.

And this is the most important of them all and gives them 1 star if not all of the above things would have happened. So I went there with my girlfriend which is pregnant! And I told at least 3 waiters outside that she was pregnant! And she mentioned this to them as-well, then assured us that this was no problem. Even when the starter came, which was raw meat! my girlfriend told to the waiter, that she was pregnant! It wasn’t until my girlfriend felt that something was wrong, and we had to ask the guy next to us for assistance to speak to the waiter to ask if there was meat in the dish!

Now I don’t know about you but lets say you had nut allergy, lets just say any allergy. This would be much more fussed about and the staff there would have more to say then “we are really sorry!”

Do yourselves a favor and when you decide to go to a blind restaurant, go to the one in Berlin instead, they have a much calmer dining area, better food, better wine and the waiters...

Pros You get to experience how people with blindness live in this world. It's humbling. Your other senses get highly sensitive, especially your hearing. Interesting when eating. People were nice, from reception to servers.

Cons: You're seated extremely close to other people/strangers, table stuck side by side, and it can get very overwhelming and distracting as you can hear a lot. Like I said, your hearing gets more sensitive. For some reason, people raise their voices in there. Up to a certain point, they were screaming. I was covering my ears asking to leave. It was intense. They serve you Set secret menus that lack a lot of flavor. Our menu with entree/plat/dessert and 2 glasses of wine had no protein at all and cost 79 euros per person. There was a bland risotto, interesting textures, but we left hungry and feeling like we got duped. You can't really say anything about it, the moment you get served, the server leaves and since you're in complete darkness, welp 🤷🏻‍♀️ You have to wait until everyone you entered with (groups of 6 people) have finished, to be served your next course. People in our group had asked for more courses than we did, so we actually waited around 20 mins for our main dish after finishing the entree. We were starving. Again, nothing you can do or say about it. They leave and you're stuck with everyone else's timing to get your own dish. They should pair people by chosen menus in that case.

All around, it's something I would never do again. It felt like I was trapped in a tourist trap, unfortunately. The principle of it seemed interesting to my partner and I, but it was loud, food was bland/tasteless, no appropriate quality/cost (not even chicken, just a risotto and veggie stuff). I would suggest you save your $160 euros/couple and go somewere else, like a Michelin...